Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt.  The whole thing is a Louisiana lottery.  The very next trap may hold a silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr. Harris.  As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond du Lac.  In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake.  Caribou skins are in prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.  About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother Church.  Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear, and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty money and annual reunion in July.

Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou (rangifer articus), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the bands of the dead and gone buffalo.  Caribou go north in spring and south in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou form the advance line.  They drop their young far out toward the seacoast in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.  The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July.  From this time they stay together till the rutting season is over late in October.  Then the great herds of caribou,—­“la foule,”—­gather on the edge of the woods and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food afforded by the country of the larger pine trees.  A month later the females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.

This is the general rule.  Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and westward branches of the caribou family.  But the trend of this mighty migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and divert them from their line of march.  Individuals and scattered bands, indeed, have been known not to migrate at all.  Fifteen years ago in the last days of July, in latitude 62 deg. 15’ North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand individuals.  In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near Fort Rae on the ice.  It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in the words of an eye-witness, “daylight could not be seen through the column.”